Hollywood could help us lighten up

By Ed Fitzgerald

Monday, February 25, 2013

We all need to lighten up. Everyone tells you that laughter is the best medicine, but do we listen? Of course not. This occurs to me every year as I watch the Academy Awards (while I’m at work, looking at a small screen and not at a catered party like some of you swells). Hollywood wields a lot of clout. We don’t like to admit it, but there it is. The influence of movies is far-reaching. For instance, all of a sudden we care again about Abraham Lincoln. He’s a great man, but his story has been told a million times. I wish I had a penny for every time I’ve heard about him walking 5 miles to school. And speaking of pennies — the mint is thinking of doing away with the Lincoln penny — how important can he be?

The person who hosts the Academy Awards ceremony is often funny, like Seth MacFarlane this year or Jon Stewart and David Letterman in years past. But most of the movies considered as all-time classics are deadly serious: “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “Gone With the Wind.” Not that serious movies don’t have funny moments. Clark Gable’s smug scoundrel, Rhett Butler, provided a smile or two, usually at the expense of Scarlett O’Hara.

But Hollywood rarely honors the lighter side of movies.

Let’s dissect this. Somewhere in between the epic serious movie and the terrible Adam Sandler movie is the dark comedy. This would seem to be impossible cinematic terrain to tread. Ethan and Joel Coen do it the best. Their movie “Fargo” had laughs aplenty, most of them very uneasy. It’s hard to laugh when no less than seven people — most of them innocents — are gunned down. And Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” had hilarious moments, if you didn’t mind a woman and a dog (anyone but the dog!) dying of unnatural causes.

But come award season and apparently it’s not good — or cool — to laugh. Woody Allen’s 1977 movie, “Annie Hall” is one of the very few comedies to win the Academy Award for Best Movie. Its star, Diane Keaton also won the Best Actress honor. The really good comedies almost always possess tender moments. This goes all the way back to the silent movies made by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And it’s the tender moments that boost my favorite comedies to another level, movies such as, “Parenthood” with Steve Martin (he should’ve won an Oscar as an over-caring dad driven to tears by his son catching a pop-up), “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray, “Hero” with Dustin Hoffman and “Defending Your Life” with Al Brooks. All of those funny movies are capable of delivering a poignant moment of awareness. Then there’s my favorite movie of all time — and one of the funniest — “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Is there anything more poignant than a nuclear catastrophe? I ask you.

Our society needs to laugh. Now more than ever. And Hollywood could help. Maybe there’s some hope. This year the Academy Award for Best Movie went to “Argo.” This was definitely not a comedy. It was the story of the harrowing 1979 rescue of hostages who were kidnapped by militant Iranians. But there was funny stuff in the movie. Lots of it. It’s hard not to have humor when you have three top-notch comedic actors like John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Bryan Cranston. And at this year’s Oscars it was also kind of funny watching Jennifer Lawrence fall on her way up to accept her Best Actress award. But that’s just because she’s talented, young, rich and beautiful. Comedy is all about timing. And it’s never a good time to see an untalented, old, poor and ugly person fall.

So lighten up folks. Smile. Bust a gut laughing. Don’t let those worry lines re-define your face. Take time to smell the roses and, hopefully, one of those roses will be fake and squirt water in your face.

(I’m also hoping that my wife has a sense of humor because I’ve included with this essay nothing but pictures of hot starlets and I don’t care if they’re funny or serious or somewhere in between.)